Credit characteristics are a major foundation of consumer credit decisioning. Inconsistent or inequitable definitions in characteristics across Credit Reporting Agencies (CRAs) results in vastly different risk perspectives when decisioning. In particular, this is true for the majority of consumers whose credit profile is housed by more than one CRA.
It is a common practice that a CRA independently defines characteristics that take advantage of their own credit reporting structure. If required, the CRA then takes the characteristic definitions and makes the best attempt to “fit” data from another CRA to those definitions. Since the characteristics are written to maximize use of the information from the CRA's own data structure, it may prove challenging (or even impossible) to apply the definitions to another CRA's data. Further, while one CRA may have peripheral knowledge of the others' data, the CRA does not have access to all the detailed knowledge that an insider to the other organization would have. This detailed knowledge includes past updates (with timing) to the reporting structure, plans for changes to the reporting structure, detailed definitions and/or intended uses for data elements, etc.
It is not uncommon that consumer credit grantors have their market share of credit profile requests spread across multiple credit reporting agencies. Independent of the agency from which the credit information originated, it is desirable that grantors have the ability to make uniform credit decisions.